Thursday, August 29, 2013

And so, 1993: twenty years ago, the year I turned 25, graduated from BYU, started graduate school, and married Melissa. And also, to a great extent, stopped being interested in radio, at least to the degree I had before. What happened? And if not the radio, what was I listening to then?

After my mission to South Korea, I return to BYU and Provo, UT, and for a while I could pick up where I'd left off two years before. But there were changes afoot; through a variety of back-room deals and bankruptcies, KJQ changed ownership, most of its staff were either fired or quit, some of whom then organized a takeover of KZOL 96.1 FM, which was promptly re-branded KXRK or "X96," with eventually most of the old modern rock/college/alternative music DJs from KJQ showing up under X96's banner. Dom Casual, Kerry Jackson, Bill Allred: it was "Radio from Hell" back again, only under a new call sign. The transitions didn't change much about the music they played, but it may have signaled a change in attitude towards it--or maybe it was just that grunge was increasingly dominant, and so "New Wave" rather abruptly became something about which snide jokes could be made. Didn't matter to me; I still listened. I may have missed things when grunge first broke, but it was nice to be listening as it as it reached an apotheosis of sorts (see, for example, Nirvana's "All Apologies"). And besides, the grunge sensibility lent itself to more acoustic and less refined, more worldly and unconventional pop music; hence, Björk's album Debut...

...the same trends which made her possible also influencing former mainstays of alternative radio in Utah to respond in different ways. U2's Zooropa was an embrace of electronic dance rhythms, for example...

...but for all that, to an ever-increasing extent, my attention was being drawn elsewhere.

Was it the widespread arrival of the internet (or the "World Wide Web," as we tended to call it back then), the rise of file-sharing, the emerging realization that MTV wasn't going to play music videos any more? Some of that, I suppose. Maybe it was just the general sense that radio, the mainstay of my youth, was being forced to treat its primary good--pop music--as increasingly disposable and dispensable. It would be just as easy to see in this a triumph, with a once-predictable media platform being forced to diversify in line with changing technology and segmentation: so this was the era when shock jocks and talk radio went huge, becoming a national commercial (and political) force, crowding out pop stations or forcing them to adapt and/or narrow-cast their programming along the way. I suppose it's silly to see the rapid conquest of so much of the radio dial by the forces of ideological and aesthetic Balkinization as a loss for our common pop culture; I can look at my previous entries in this series, and imagine someone who was of my age and cohort growing up Spokane, WA--only perhaps a Spanish-speaker, or an African-American, or an evangelical Christian--who might look at my list of tunes and conclude that I'd left them out of pop culture entirely. And they'd have a point: maybe radio as the dispenser of a common pop music foundation was always a fiction, and it only took me until I was in my early to mid-twenties to realize it.

Except: no, I don't really believe that, not entirely anyway, if only because I lived through the emergence of the structural forces that propelled all these changes, and at some point I could turn around and notice the difference. With radio increasingly no longer serving as a common reference to what's popular, musicians turned to other media--like advertising. The dinosaurs of the 60s and 70s led the way--but many others followed:

Oh, and about those "dinosaurs"--thanks to my years in Korea, I was finally listening to them. Deep in my memory, no doubt due to KJRB, a lot of classic rock was already there, but as a missionary I interacted with others who got me curious about, thinking about, and ultimately really listening to the true canon of post-WWII pop and rock music in a way I never had before. It started with James Taylor, and a revival of my memories of Al Stewart's and Gerry Rafferty's 70s folk-rock, which led me in turn back to the Grateful Dead, The Byrds, and eventually Bob Dylan. And the Beatles, of course: I bought their "Red" and "Blue" collections in Korea, and when I came back home I started building my collection of their albums and their many, many descendents properly. It didn't hurt that MTV Unplugged was going through its hey-day at this moment (Eric Clapton's monster Unplugged came out a year earlier, in 1992), and that The Rolling Stones released Voodoo Lounge and the Eagles released Hell Freezes Over just a year later, in 1994. Artists that I, in my 25th year, thought were ridiculously old (in their 40s and 50s!) were selling out huge concert halls...but not, perhaps unsurprisingly, filling up the airwaves that used to track what was popular. Casey Kasem and "American Top 40," I suddenly realized one day, were irrelevant, at least to the music industry that I saw around me. No wonder classic rock, by the late 1990s, occupied a larger portion of the total radio market share than any other format.

Well, all these concerns didn't stop me from paying attention to current pop; I just wasn't paying attention in the same way. As time went by, I was reaching out into folk and the blues and jazz, and benefiting from it all the while. Still, my pop heart kept on beating. My favorite album of the year was Sting's Ten Summoner's Tales, and for the life of me, I couldn't tell you how I first heard about it--but it wasn't from the radio, that's sure. Still, Melissa and I played our tape cassette of it to death. ("St. Augustine in Hell" was Melissa's favorite track, because she really like the line about music critics.)

Billy Joel's River of Dreams was huge too--and yet,while I'm pretty certain I heard one or two songs from it on pop radio, Joel was obviously banking on a different approach to the media to move his CDs. It worked; like half the people I knew, I watched David Letterman's new program on CBS too, and Joel managed to land right in front of our eyebrows and earlobes. (Sting managed this on Saturday Night Live too.)

Getting pop culture from not just radio, but from the internet, from television, from advertisements, and of course from movie soundtracks (like the awesome What's Love Got to Do With It?) that ended up on the radio only after finding their way to the popular consciousness through award shows and word of mouth--that was radio looked (sounded) like to me in 1993. Not that music was different, but the framing of it, the estimation of it, the--let me get really pretentious here--social position of it was different. Not lesser, perhaps, but different.

And today? Well, while I've continued, over the last 20 years, to turn on the radio whenever I'm making short trips in the car (particularly our local BOB FM station), I almost never listen to it for music anymore; at home, the radio is for NPR, and that's about it. At work, it's scads of old tape cassettes I have--Robert Johnson recordings! Midnight Oil's Earth and Sun and Moon (also from 1993, by the way)! The Beatles at the BBC!--plus CDs, plus, of course, Pandora. I suppose on some level I'm kind of sad about that; after all, would I have written this series of posts if I wasn't? But see here--I'm fully aware that maybe all I've done with this walk down memory lane is talk about the sort of transitions and technological relationships that every person who grows up goes through. I mean, radio is still around, and while my oldest daughter has never seen any need for it, Caitlyn, our second daughter (right now 13 and half years old, so coming up on where I was in 1983), listens to Wichita's 105.3 FM "The Buzz" religiously. So maybe, in the end, pop radio is just a platform for young people. When you stop being young, you go on to over things. Thank goodness the music is still there, if you know how to look for it, and even if it doesn't quite mean the same thing.

Quotes

"Every one of the standards according to which action is condemned demands action. Although the dignity of persons is inevitably violated in action, this dignity would be far less recognized in the world than it is had it not been supported by actions such as the establishment of constitutions and the fighting of wars in defense of human rights. Action must be untruthful, yet religion, science, philosophy, and the arts, the main forms of absolute fidelity to the truth, could not survive were they unsupported by action. Action cannot but be anticommunal in some measure, yet communal relationships would be almost nonexistent without areas of peace and order, which are created by action. We must act hesitantly and regretfully, then, but still we must act."

(Glenn Tinder, The Political Meaning of Christianity: The Prophetic Stance [HarperSanFrancisco, 1991], 215)

"[T]he press was still the last resource of the educated poor who could not be artists and would not be tutors. Any man who was fit for nothing else could write an editorial or a criticism....The press was an inferior pulpit; an anonymous schoolmaster; a cheap boarding-school; but it was still the nearest approach to a career for the literary survivor of a wrecked education."

"Mailer was a Left Conservative. So he had his own point of view. To himself he would suggest that he tried to think in the style of [Karl] Marx in order to attain certain values suggested by Edmund Burke."

(Norman Mailer, The Armies of the Night [The New American Library, 1968], 185)

"All those rely on their hands, and each is skillful at his own craft. / Without them a city would have no inhabitants; no settlers or travellers would come to it. / Yet they are not in demand at public discussions, nor do they attain to high office in the assembly. They do not sit on the judge's bench or understand the decisions of the courts. They cannot expound moral or legal principles and are not ready with maxims. / But they maintain the fabric of this world, and the practice of their craft is their prayer."

(Ecclesiasticus (Sirach) 38:31-34, in The Revised English Bible with the Apocrypha [Oxford University Press, 1989])

"The tendency, which is too common in these days, for young men to get a smattering of education and then think themselves unsuited for mechanical or other laborious pursuits is one that should not be allowed to grow up among us...Every one should make it a matter of pride to be a producer, and not a consumer alone."

(Wilford Woodruff, Millennial Star [November 14, 1887], 773)

"We are parts of the world; no one of us is an isolated world-whole. We are human beings, conceived in the body of a mother, and as we stepped into the larger world, we found ourselves immediately knotted to a universe with the thousand bands of our senses, our needs and our drives, from which no speculative reason can separate itself."

"'Business!' cried the Ghost, wringing its hands again. 'Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were all my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!'"

(Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol [Candlewick Press, 2006], 35)

"The Master said, 'At fifteen, I set my mind upon learning; at thirty, I took my place in society; at forty, I became free of doubts; at fifty, I understood Heaven's Mandate; at sixty, my ear was attuned; and at seventy, I could follow my heart's desires without overstepping the bounds of propriety.'"

"Lack of experience diminishes our power of taking a comprehensive view of the admitted facts. Hence those who dwell in intimate association with nature and its phenomena grow more and more able to formulate, as the foundations of their theories, principles which admit a wide and coherent development: while those whom devotion to abstract discussions has rendered unobservant of the facts are too ready to dogmatize on the basis of a few observations."

"[God] does not want men to give the Future their hearts, to place their treasure in it. . . . His ideal is a man who, having worked all day for the good of posterity (if that is his vocation), washes his mind of the whole subject, commits the issue to Heaven, and returns at once to the patience or gratitude demanded by the moment that is passing over him."

"Money is simply a tool. We use money as a proxy for our time and labor--our life energy--to acquire things that we cannot (or care not to) procure or produce with our own hands. Beyond that, it has limited actual utility: you can't eat it; if you bury it in the ground, it will not produce a crop to sustain a family; it would make a lousy roof and a poor blanket. To base our understanding of economy simply on money overlooks all other methods of exchange that can empower communities. Equating an economy only with money assumes there are no other means by which we can provide food for our bellies, a roof over our heads and clothing on our backs."

"A scholar's business is to add to what is known. That is all. But it is capable of giving the very greatest satisfaction, because knowledge is good. It does not have to look good or even sound good or even do good. It is good just by being knowledge. And the only thing that makes it knowledge is that it is true. You can't have too much of it and there is no little too little to be worth having. There is truth and falsehood in a comma."

"I believe in democracy. I accept it. I will faithfully serve and defend it. I believe in it because it appears to me the inevitable consequence of what has gone before it. Democracy asserts the fact the masses are now raised to a higher intelligence than formerly. All our civilization aims at this mark. We want to do what we can to help it. I myself want to see the result. I grant that it is an experiment, but it is the only direction society can take that is worth its taking; the only conception of its duty large enough to satisfy its instincts; the only result that is worth an effort or a risk. Every other possible step is backward, and I do not care to repeat the past. I am glad to see society grapple with issues in which no one can afford to be neutral."